With the partnership between Sony and AMD already proving successful, PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny has revealed that it will also lead to Frame Generation on “PlayStation platforms.” In an interview with Digital Foundry, Cerny noted that it won’t release for PS5 consoles this year, however.
He spoke about the development of FSR Redstone, which was also used to bring improvements to PSSR upscaling. Similarly, FSR Frame Generation has also been described by him as being based on “co-developed technology”. This work between the two companies has been progressing, and Cerny is quite happy with how it has been turning out so far.
“Just to clarify a few things about the collaboration with AMD, the new PSSR uses the same core co-developed algorithm as FSR Redstone’s Upscaling (to avoid confusion, I’ll use the new names today rather than FSR4),” Cerny shared. “FSR Frame Generation is also based on co-developed technology (or as my good friend [SVP and GM of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group] Jack Huynh puts it, ‘co-engineered technology’). I’m very happy with how that work is progressing, and an equivalent frame generation library should be seen at some point on PlayStation platforms.”
As for what these “PlayStation platforms” might be, Cerny noted that Sony doesn’t have any major technological releases planned for this year. “All I can say is that we have no more releases planned for this year. And I look forward to discussing this more in the future!”
Back in October, Cerny and Huynh had discussed the kinds of improvements that the two companies had been working on. The collaboration involves bringing in major graphical improvements while also reducing processing overhead.
“The challenge comes in how we implement these systems,” said Cerny in a video. “The neural networks found in technologies like FSR and PSSR are incredibly demanding on the GPU. They’re both computationally intensive and require speedy access to large amounts of memory. The nature of the GPU fights us here.”
Among the technologies introduced in the video were Neural Arrays, which would involve GPU compute units tackling larger problems together rather than each one tackling smaller problems individually.
“We’re not linking the entire GPU into one mega unit,” explained Huynh. “That would be a cable management nightmare. But we are connecting [compute units] within each shader engine in a smart, efficient way. And that changes the game for neural rendering. Bigger [machine learning] models, less overhead, more efficiency, and way more scalability as workloads grow.”
Along with Neural Arrays, the two also discussed Radiance Cores, which are built with Neural Radiance Caching as their foundation. The technology will handle ray tracing and path tracing in real-time, and will ultimately constitute a “brand new rendering approach for AMD,” said Huynh.
More recently, Sony released an upgraded version of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which made its debut on PS5 Pro with the release of Resident Evil Requiem. The feature is gradually rolling out to other titles, including Silent Hill 2 Remake, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Nioh 3, and Cyberpunk 2077, among others.
